Saturday, Aug. 16, 2003 - 12:42 am
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Last night I finally finished reading a book called The Future of Love by Daphne Rose Kingma. It has taken me a few months to read, not because it's especially long or difficult, but because this book is so full, I often found myself reading a page or two and needing to stop so that I could process what I had read.
This book is changing my life. This book is expanding my mind. If somehow I could make everyone read one book, this would be it. The ideas in it have the potential to revolutionize the ways we interact with one another, on every level. I keep getting in conversations with people about relationships, and realizing that my frame of reference has changed so much in the past few months, because of this book and conversations and experiences I've had, that at some point I feel like I'd have to explain all this background info in order to make myself clear. Possibly it's simpler to just convince people to read this book.
So, what is it about? I'm going to have to figure out a good answer to that question so that I can talk about it with people.
It's about moving out of old traditional forms of relationship that are not really serving us, and realizing how much love is available to us in new and different forms of relationships, often relationships we're already having. And, it's about loving on a soul level, instead of a personality level. It really is about the future of love, and the ways we're evolving through how we love.
I feel I should clarify that this is not a book about polyamory, though that can be part of these new forms of relationships. But what the book is about is much bigger.
I am so in love with this book, that I really want to share more of it, and I wanted to record some of the passages that are especially meaningful for me, so I've taken the time to type up some excerpts.
This book is about the breaking down of relationships as we have known them, the subsequent emergence of new forms of relatedness, and the future of love. It is about a journey we're already taking. ...Having been raised to regard marriage as the only honorable relationship, we woke up to discover that it was only one in a vast array of intimate connections. ...
The truth is, we have all come from love.... Love is the river, each human being a droplet of water, and together, in spite of our fears and resistance, we are returning to love, melting and flowing toward home.
We're all looking for more love. It's that simple. In the end, nothing else really matters to us. In the beginning and in the middle, we're concerned with the forms of our relationships, what they look like, what our parents think of them, how they stack up in the eyes of the world, and whether we're getting our share of the goodies: sexually, emotionally, and financially.
But in the end, we won't care about the forms. The forms will be as multitudinous as the stars and all that will matter is the love that was in them. No one can escape the divine upheaval of love. I haven't; you won't; your neighbors and strangers and family won't either. Love is coming to find us. All of us. Because love is our essence. Love is who we are.
...
We are being invited to move from falling in love to loving, from romance to true love, from relationships that are an undertaking of the personality to unions that are illumined by the soul. We are being asked to mature into our true wholeness, as human beings who are in fact divine eternal souls, and we are being invited to do this in relationship.
...
Soul love is the greatest love there is. When we build a relationship with full awareness of our souls, we have a profound sense of connectedness which transcends the limits of all our human, romantic relationships and give us a glimpse of our true spiritual magnificence. At the level of the soul, we all recognize one another and know that each relationship, little or grand, is but a tiny snowflake in the vast avalanche of ebullient white light that is all the love in the world.
Each day, as our relationships change and we change with them, we are proving that conscious love is possible, regardless of its form, regardless of its surprising and curious contents. We are discovering that there is a particular time and an exquisite uniqueness to each individual pairing, that an ending can also be a beginning, that each time the energies shift and we create a new relationship, we are aligning with new life, new possibilities. The process may be agonizing, but even the agony can be a gift. It is a reminder of the depth of our emotions, of our capacity for passion and forgiveness, for generosity and expansiveness, and of our longing to love and to be loved.
...
The beauty in all this is that through our relationships we are arriving at the spiritual level. As our personalities are healed and the painful layers all fall away, we are beginning to understand that the spiritual part of each of us will never be fully satisfied by any one human relationship. We see that each relationship is a step along the journey to that satisfaction and so we can stop beating ourselves up each time a relationship ends. As each of us moves through our own particular dance card of relationships, we will gradually discover that the breaking down of traditional forms is a unique opportunity to get acquainted with a larger truth--that we are all, in some way, in relationship with one another. We will bask in that truth. We will consciously move toward it. ...
...
We stretch, and to our amazement we don't break. Instead we grow. Suddenly, everything becomes easier, and our hearts, which once we believed could only love one person, or were battered so badly we thought they could never love again, expand so fully that the whole world is welcome. In such a state of openness, we see that we have only forgotten how to be together, we faintly and beautifully remember that once we were all together. We remember the way we were in a universe of incredible softness where there were no edges, no walls, no mind games, no rules. In that incredible world, we were happy. We loved one another. It wasn't a feeling. It was a state of being called joy.
The future of love is this all-encompassing embrace. For when we have expanded so much, we will finally arrive at a place where the heart can open its doors to everything and everyone. Our souls have been taking us on this journey and Love is the magnificent destination to which they have been leading us. Now we can feel joy. Now, at least, we can be satisfied. Now, finally, we are home.
I highly highly encourage everyone to go out and find this book and read it. If I could afford to, I'd buy a bunch of copies to hand out to people that are interested.
Thank you for reading.
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recent listening: Magnolia, soundtrack; Elliott Smith - XO; Sgt. Pepper
recent viewing: MST3K; Farscape
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